A Tough Desert Challenge in Chile

Press Release / 02.12.2022

The first edition of the Desert Challenge, Chile's qualifying event for the South American ARWS Series, was a tough and challenging race, held on the coast of central Chile and starting with an ocean paddle on the Pacific.

The race began on the beautiful beach of Puerto Velero, with teams running along the beach to their kayaks and pushing off through the surf to cover the first 30 km kayaking stage.

In the first kilometres they were already advancing quickly. The Aysen team, Izan Invictus and Team Menetue-Army gained an advantage, with the Menetue team taking a small advantage into stage two.

In the next trekking stage, this team managed to get away for up to 1 hour, but behind them the powerful Merrell team were second and in third was the Chasqui Outdoors team (all of them with the best racers on the Chilean circuit). 

Further into the course Aysen and Izan Invictus began to struggle with navigation.  They looked very strong physically, but were not strong navigators. This made them abandon the race at a very early stage, and the first 3 teams began to open a big lead over the others.

In the following MTB stage, the Menetue Army captain made a serious navigation error, and Merrell and Chasqui Outdoors managed to catch up during the night, but the 3 teams were delayed for a couple of hours finding a checkpoint.  Even so, they continued together through the night and arrived at the base camp at the end of the stage together.  There they would transition to the penultimate trekking stage, and this would decide the race.

Only one of them would win and the race developed between Menetue-Army, a team with a lot of experience and a great navigator, and the Merrell team, who were physically more powerful, but not so strong with their navigation.

Both of them put up a tough fight, taking advantage of their strengths between each PC.  They were already exhausted and racing in the hot sun, so when the Menetue-Army team reached the race base camp two hours before the end of the race, they decided to finish there.  They wouldn’t complete the last MTB stage and would wait and leave it to fate to see if Merrell managed to reach the finish with PC24, which the army team hadn’t visited.

The wait was in their favour.  Already dehydrated in the heat, the Merrell team arrived at the finish without PC24 and neither team had the strength to go back out on the final Mtb stage. So the race closed there and Menetue-Army won, and took a place at the ARWS South America championship final at La Gesta in Paraguay next February. Merrell took second place and Chasqui outdoor were third.